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President Donald Trump speaks via a live feed from the Rose Garden at the White House to anti-abortion activists as they rally on the National Mall on Jan. 19 during the annual March for Life. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo

Trump scores few legislative wins against abortion in first year

Introduced at an anti-abortion rally Friday as “the most pro-life president in American history,” Donald Trump touted his accomplishments by video.

But the reality is that one year into his term, Trump and congressional Republicans have scored no major legislative wins on their abortion agenda.

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Trump — who two decades ago called himself “very pro-choice” — came into office with promises to pursue an ambitious anti-abortion agenda, including supporting legislation to defund Planned Parenthood and eliminate most abortion access after 20 weeks of pregnancy and placing “pro-life” justices on the Supreme Court.

Although Republicans control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, they’ve failed at several attempts to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood, and no legislative changes to abortion access have gotten through the Senate, let alone to the Oval Office. The one piece of anti-abortion legislation that passed last year reversed an Obama-era regulation that banned states from blocking abortion providers from getting Title X family planning funding. Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate, and Trump signed the bill into law.

Despite that scant legislative record, the Trump White House has won kudos from anti-abortion leaders for successfully laying the groundwork for long-term change likely to affect the abortion debate for years to come through appointments to the the federal judiciary — from the Supreme Court on down.

Trump’s Supreme Court appointment of Neil Gorsuch was celebrated by anti-abortion groups. And he has gotten a dozen federal appeals court judges through the Senate — a record for a president’s first year.

“Can we just thank God for giving us a pro-life president back in the White House?” Speaker Paul Ryan said Friday when addressing the annual March for Life on the national mall.

Lacking Senate votes to pass anti-abortion legislation, the Trump administration has also used executive authority to enact its agenda.

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The administration this week overturned guidance issued at the end of the Obama administration that would have made it harder for states to defund Planned Parenthood. It also set up a new division at HHS to investigate providers that don’t allow employees to opt out of providing treatment, such as abortion, because of religious or moral objections.

"This is part of the Trump administration's commitment to rolling back regulations that [the] Obama administration put out to radically favor abortion,” HHS spokeswoman Charmaine Yoest told reporters.

While HHS did not explicitly call for allowing states to defund Planned Parenthood on Friday, officials left the door open to doing so in the future. Whether states can defund Planned Parenthood without congressional approval is already under challenge in the courts. Two circuit courts have issued different rulings, meaning the issue could be bound for the Supreme Court.

Last year, the administration also took the teeth out of Obamacare’s requirement that nearly all employers provide contraception in their employee health insurance plans. And one of Trump’s first executive orders last January was to reinstate the ban on any foreign health spending to any international group that funds or shares information about abortion. Funding to the United Nations Population Fund was eliminated, too.

But the Trump administration is breaking little new ground on abortion. The regulatory changes announced this week and the Obamacare contraception policies represented rollbacks of the last administration’s policies. And the federal aid policy always ping-pongs between Democrats who allow it and Republicans who ax it — although the Trump administration did take it further than the George W. Bush administration by applying it to all foreign health spending and not just family planning money.

Abortion rights supporters warn that they believe the Trump administration will make other regulatory tweaks that could undermine access to abortion, such as cuts to teen pregnancy prevention funding and changes to a key family planning funding grant that could make it harder for abortion providers to access federal dollars.

“This administration is going to double down on these attacks in 2018,” predicted Emily Stewart, vice president of public policy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “We expect that they will attempt to try to implement a domestic gag rule” that would prevent funding to physicians who promote or share information about accessing abortion.

Abortion opponents say they’re pleased with what Republicans have been able to accomplish in 2017 and blame any lack of progress on the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to break a filibuster.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), a co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, blamed the filibuster for a lack of further progress. “That’s it. There is no other reason.”

“A lot of getting more done is getting more individuals here in the U.S. Senate that are compassionate on the life issue,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), a prominent opponent of abortion, told POLITICO. “Obviously most of the time we can’t even bring it to the floor for debate.”

Republicans tried to skirt the filibuster to defund Planned Parenthood by attaching it to an Obamacare repeal bill that could have passed with only 50 votes. But even with 52 Republicans in the Senate in 2017, the GOP wasn’t able to muster the votes. The effort failed in part because two of the three Republicans who ultimately voted no didn’t want to defund the program.

Supporters of abortion rights say that even in a GOP-controlled Washington, the failure to defund Planned Parenthood is a sign of hope. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), co-chairwoman of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, said town hall meetings and calls to lawmakers successfully prevented Republicans from doing more.

“We’re not talking about shutting down the government for Planned Parenthood funding anymore,” she said. “Finally, Republican leadership seems to have gotten the message that Americans support this. … We’ve been pleased that with the activism of the groups and by the commitment of members, we’ve been able to hold the line.”